Alternative POV: your permanent *speech* record is unimportant. Speech is not action, and there’s nothing you could say on nostr that isn’t protected by the First Amendment.
But what about the UK, or even the US apparatchiks like Tim Walz who want to criminalize dissent as “misinformation?” Surely it’s dangerous to say things on nostr that might one day be connected to your real life identity?
No it is not. If some communist is going to get you for saying Kamala Harris is a moron, then they will get you for anything or nothing at all. The day I can be arrested for my nostr posts, the answer will not be to hide in anonymity and hope someone else — someone dumb enough to attach his real identity or unlucky enough to have his keys compromised — gets got instead.
I really don’t like the ethos of: “Oh no, I can’t pretend I didn’t say what I said!”
How about:
"I said what I fucking said because I earnestly believed it at the time, and I either stand by it now or I realize I was in error and I no longer stand by it, though it was said in earnest, and it was an honest mistake."
The people who are worried they’ll be arrested for free speech don’t really believe in free speech. The people who will only say what they truly believe anonymously don’t really believe in free speech.
They believe one *should* have the right to free speech in an ideal society, but in the present one it doesn’t exist and therefore they won’t avail themselves of it.
But your rights don’t come from society. They come from nature, God, the Tao, whatever.
If you believe in free speech, you use it. And yes, I get it, if you’re in North Korea, you wouldn’t, and that’s fine. But if you’re intimidated by speaking the truth because you might get found out, God forbid, for earnestly expressing yourself by the UK loser police, you are not really for free speech. Not when it has even a small risk, a small cost.
So if you want free speech to exist, speak freely, stop fomenting fear, have courage.
Sorry, not meaning to pick on this particular npub — this is a common theme on this otherwise based protocol.
I have been using Nostr for two years now, and the lack of a NIP-09 (event delete) or its equivalent standard on Nostr is, more than ever, a significant privacy and safety issue built into the current version of the protocol.
Snowden warned us of the dangers of a permanent record. Have we not learned anything?
Nostr, as it is right now, is a permanent record that seeks to tie all of your apps and your coin transactions to one key pair.
If that key pair is ever compromised, EVERYTHING is compromised.
If you accidentally doxx yourself, you are HOSED.
It's bad OPSEC. And it sounds like a honeypot waiting to happen.
Amber (event signer) is a decent workaround, but it has not passed a third-party security audit, and I still believe a parent/child key system is the way to go as it does not expand your attack surface by having to depend on a third party to keep all of your Nostr business safe.
Now back to event deletion...
The protocol is the protocol. Relays must use the protocol to participate in the network.
If the protocol requires honoring event deletion requests to participate in the network, then Nostr will have avoided this festering security and safety issue.
If certain #Nostr devs don't stop saying universal post deletes can't happen because of xyz (insert biased limiting belief/excuse here), and start figuring out how it can be done... it's a protocol design that's dead in the water to anything but mostly nameless, faceless anons.
The future is privacy-first, client-side computing, not relays. The clock is ticking.
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